Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Welcome to Talking Bach and our first podcast of 2026.
In this podcast we will be talking all about Bach's extraordinary vocal motets. My guest to help me on my journey is Christopher Watson. He is an APRA AMCOS award winning choir trainer and tenor. Originally from the UK but based in Melbourne, Australia. Since January 2017 he is the Director of Music at Trinity College, the University of melbourne and at St. Peter's Eastern Hill. Now, prior to his move to Australia, he had an enormously successful career in Europe making over 550 appearances with groups such as the Tallis Scholars and as a member of groups such as Tenebrae Gallicantus Collegium Vocal Gent and the Theatre of Voices. With the Theatre of Voices, he made his Carnegie hall debut in 2009 with David Lange's Little Match Girl Passion, the the recording of which won a Grammy Award in 2010.
He considers his finest achievements to be his performances of the English national Anthem at the 2017 Boxing Day Test match and the subsequent One Day International cricket matches, neither of which England lost.
Some of the recordings he is most proud of are with Sete Voce of the bach Motets, actually 12 apart, directed by Peter Coy, probably the recording of which he is most proud of.
He has also sung as an evangelist in Bach's Passion all over the world, including the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City and in Canterbury Cathedral and Melbourne Recital Centre.
Welcome Chris, to Talking Bach. It's lovely to see you and speak to you all about Bach once again after many years.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Indeed, yes. Thank you very much, it's great. Lovely to see you even if we're not in the same city quite yet.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: That's right. You're in Melbourne at the moment, are you? Yes, that's right. Ready for the cricket?
[00:02:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Look, I've got an Australian passport now, so I think the English one's gone in the draw and the Australian one's coming out.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Well, can I ask you that awful question? Are you going for England or Australia in the Ashes?
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Look, I think it's fair to support the country of your birth, but also I think one should support the country of one's residency. And when the two come up against each other, I think birth trumps residency, but only just.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: Fair enough. Well, it's sort of a win win situation then in the end for you.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yes, in fact, I'm guaranteed to win the Ashes and I'm sure that's how it works. Really.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Yes.
Well, listen, we're here to talk about the Bach motets.
And we are talking about the Bach motets because Bach Academy Australia is presenting. Are presenting. Is presenting. I'm not sure how you say that. Is presenting the complete motets of Bach in our first program of 2026.
Now this is something we have never done before. We've never done a complete V program, so it's a bit of a departure for us. But I am so excited that you yourself will be one of our eight hand picked singers for this project.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I can't wait. It's fantastic. I'm so pleased that I've been asked and you know, I've had a lot. I've been in Australia for now for nine years and this is one of the most exciting offers I've had so far. So I'm very, very pleased.
[00:03:43] Speaker A: That's very kind of you to say. So what's been your relationship with the motets?
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Look, the first time I sang a Bach motet was in, was it 1990, I think at Durham Cathedral. I left university where I'd sung at Exeter Cathedral Choir when I was studying music.
The people who were friends with me at the time will laugh when they heard me say studying music because I, I did lots of things. I learned how to cook and play croquet and conduct and sing, but I didn't really. Anyway, so I graduated from Exeter, I went to Durham to be a lay clerk, sang in the cathedral choir there. And the director music at the time, a chap called James Lancelot, I don't think it ever occurred to him that things are too difficult for people. He would just decide he was going to do something.
So there we were in Evensong. I think it must have been the summer of 91, maybe the end of my first year singing Zing Dem Hearn with, you know, 16 boys from northeast England and 12 lay clerks and chorus scholars and just doing it as an anthem. But even so, I'm not quite sure what the congregation made of it. So that was my first experience. I'd sung the B Minor Mass at university and I'd listened a lot to that repertoire when I was younger.
But this was my first experience of singing one of the motets.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: How did it hit you when you first sung it?
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Physically, very hard. You know, it's such difficult music. Technically I don't think I know anything that's harder technically. There are contemporary pieces like the Messi and Saint Croissant, which may be harder harmonically to sing, but I don't think anything I've ever sung anything that's any harder technically, and my voice certainly wasn't quite ready for it then.
I think it probably is now. Hopefully I've sung them a lot since, but. Yes, I'll never forget that. And to do it in. In as an act of worship as well was a. Was a. Was an extraordinary thing in an English cathedral where you would normally sing Stanford and Howells, and there we were singing 15 minutes of Bach. It was wonderful.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: That's sort of inspired, isn't it, for teachers and educators to have inserted that just to show you what else there is out there and what is possible for the voice and what's possible with many voices.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: It was, in fact, and I remember the assistant organist, the guy who accompanied the choir, he'd just been on a sabbatical and working with Opera north as a repetitur. And I remember him coming back and really, really enthused by the text and using some of the skills he'd learned repertoire, opera.
As he was teaching, teaching the choir to sing. He took some of the rehearsals and that was the first time I'd ever kind of thought of choral music and opera and rhetoric and all those things being connected.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that's something I've also discovered over the years as well, coming from a violinist background and having more and more exposure to choral music myself and finding all those connections. And it's something that John Elliot Gardner used to say a lot in rehearsals. He would say, play the words, not the notes.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: You have these light bulb moments that go off in your brain. And that was certainly one for me.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: Yeah, we. I used to sing with a group that did Renaissance masses with instruments, with cornets and sackbats. And the Cornettis particularly always said they preferred to have the text. They didn't just want the instrumental part, partly because they would actually try and match the vowel sounds with their embouchure, but also because it just informs the way you phrase it.
And if you're working with singers and we. I did a performance of Zing it recently with my choir with instruments, and I made sure the instrumentalists all had the text.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Good on you. That's because.
[00:07:15] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. It's so. It just. It informs the phrasing. And in the end, with Bach particularly, it's about the words and it's about the meaning of the words and the emotions they convey. And his extraordinarily confident faith.
And it's all about that faith.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Yes. That's an amazing expression.
And that faith informed why he wrote them what are your impressions of why he wrote these pieces in the first place, how they came into being?
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Look, I think he wrote everything for particular liturgical occasions, didn't he? So some of them are funeral pieces.
I think some of them are written for specific funerals. I'm not sure we know very much about the exact dates of the performances of them all, but. But yeah, I mean, everything he wrote, obviously, with the cantatas, we. We have the dates and the. The specific texts and things.
Everything he did was informed by the church year and by, you know, funerals or weddings or. Or the. The liturgical movement of the seasons.
Yeah. I mean, it's extraordinary thing to think, really, that his choir, his boys would wake up every week and what's he written this week? You know, and these have to sing. The fact.
I mean, how long someone calculated how long it would take to write the stuff out if you did it all by hand, and how one human being had the strength and the time not only to make it up, but actually to physically to write it out. It's extraordinary.
So, yeah, the. They were written for these special occasions, I think, in his life, and particularly the funeral mertets.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: I think they're extraordinary works and they're so. They are so powerful as well, and they've more than stood the test of time. There is one extraordinary fact about these motets, and that is they are the only works of Bach to have been continuously performed after his death until the big Bach revival of Mendelssohn and Leipzig.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: 50, 60 years later.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: It's fascinating, isn't it? I wonder if it's because you can do them without instruments, apart from Lorbit, which needs a. Needs a bass. I wonder if there's. There's something about that. Because, of course, none of the other famous pieces of Bach can be done unaccompanied. You need to have an orchestra, whereas with the motets, you can just put them on with choir or with. Or with continuing.
I wonder if there's anything about that.
Yeah, they're so personal. I guess all Bach's music is personal, isn't it? The passion choirs and things, the choruses.
But the Passions have a very specific once. Once a year reason, don't they? And likewise the cantatas, they. You wouldn't. I can't imagine they would have performed the cantatas outside the days for which they are written. No, but the motets do allow you to perform just, you know, you can. You can perform them whenever you like, and you don't need all these instruments. With you. So it may just be quite prosaic and it was practically the easiest things to do.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: You. You might be right about that. That's a very good point. Yeah.
But isn't it wonderful that they were performed continuously? Because, you know, then it offered someone such as Vosgang Amadeus Mozart to come into contact with the motets. And he was famously heard to say after he heard Zing it, Dan Hound.
Now there's something one can learn from. Yep, that's the famous Mozart quote. And after he heard Zing it, it really influenced his music. I mean, you just have to look at the end of the Jupiter Symphony to know that something like Zing it. Dane Hearn. Sorry. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about when we say Zing it, it is the title of his motet, BWV225 Zing it Dan Han, which is Sing to the Lord. And it contains a double choir SATB and then satb and it contains eight part polyphony. It's some of the most complicated but brilliant vocal writing anyone ever composed.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Oh, it's totally bonkers. Amazing.
[00:11:05] Speaker A: And so Mozart heard this piece and thought, wow, now there's something I can learn from. Isn't that wonder.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it's such horizontal music. There's eight different things happening at once round what is basically a relatively simple chord sequence. But the way that he cycles through the keys and. And everyone is doing stuff which complements and clashes and it's. It's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: It is. It's a miracle of composition.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know anything like it as a singer, really. There's, you know, I think as an instrumentalist you can play the Brandenburgs or the Mozart symphonies and things, but for singers there's very, very little like it. Palestrina, of course, and those chaps who wrote this lovely horizontal writing in. In the Renaissance Prolifera with imitative entries. There's a. There's a. Obviously there's a. They're immensely complex as well, but there's nothing quite like this.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: That's right. And how do these motets compare to other pieces of Baroque polyphony or even Renaissance polyphony? Why don't we go backwards and compare it?
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think if you look at the greatest of the English composers, Tallis and Bird, there's nothing to compare in their writing, really. If you look at Gibbons, I think there's a. There's a lovely. Oh, clap your hands. Wonderful. Eight part motet by Orlando Gibbons, which has a lot of uses some of the same tricks that sort of fugal entries and polyphonic effects and things and quite complex 8. Eight things going on along at the same time.
But there's not much repertoire from that period. And I know maybe some of the Tompkins big verse anthems, Tompkins Wheels, Gibbon, so that you're looking at the very end of the Renaissance.
And then of course Henry Purcell, the big.
But his music doesn't. It's not the same. It's. It's. It's not. I just don't think there's anything quite like it. And the sad thing of course in England is after Purcell's death, we don't really have anyone to compare.
There's lots of lovely music written in the 18th century in England, but nothing really along the lines. And in France you've got people like Ramo, which again is. It's the law. The dance movements, you know that this based in all the dances and things, but it doesn't. It's not as complex.
I don't find it anything like. As engaging. It's quite pretty.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: But yeah, if you really want to, you can dive inside these motets and when you realize the complexity of eight part polyphony and what he's done and how he uses the text in both a. A, A sort of lyrically musical and then onomatopoeic way.
Staggering. We were talking about this earlier on today, weren't.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Yeah, the way he sets the word palkin, you know, in the sort of the drums.
It's. And it's extraordinary. And the word. Even, even the word zing, it just means sing, but it just. It zings through the piece and you get the way the, the entries come in one after another.
And it's. The sound effects of the words are so important. I mean, I, I think that's partly the German language because it. German is such a joy to sing because you have all these. These sounds. So it's not just about the meaning of the words, but it's about the sound of the words and the joy they create. Certainly in that piece, which is such.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: A joyous piece, it's his ability to take the sound of the words and amplify them and use them to complement and you know, to ever greater effect the meaning of the words. He was thinking on so many levels, wasn't he, when he was writing?
[00:14:24] Speaker B: He was. And it's, it's the, the thing about it, it's a. It's. It's immensely academic but completely joyful. You know, there's not one. There's not a second when you get bogged down in thinking, oh, someone's too clever for his own good. It is too clever for his own good. But you don't notice that because it's so beautiful and joyous at the same time.
[00:14:42] Speaker A: Absolutely.
As a singer, what makes them so difficult? You mentioned a little bit about that before. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: It's. Well, in zing it, for instance, he just doesn't give anywhere to breathe. It looks like a violin part and they're very, very florid.
Proper, you know, proper coloratura. Some of the, the semi, lengthy, semiquaver passages, as complex as a Mozart aria or, you know, Rossini, are, in terms of their vocal stamina required. They're long, the phrases are long, the pieces are long, they have very, very wide ranges, they demand an awful lot from you technically as a singer.
And, and then it's the combination of that, but also the intellectual complexity as well. And if you're in the middle of an eight part texture, if you're doing a job, you should know what all the other parts are doing at the same time. So the brain is fizzing. You're really, it's, it's, it's a, it's knackering to sing, if one can use the word knackering in a podcast in Australia, it's because it's physically engaging, physically hard work on the voice, mentally difficult.
And, you know, you're standing there for ages. They're, they're big pieces.
I just, as I said, it's boring to repeat, but I don't know anything else quite like it for a singer. I think as an instrumentalist, you probably have the symphonies of, you know, the Mahler symphonies or whatever, but I don't think there's a, there's an equivalent really, for, for the singers.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: I think your analogy of the Brandenburg concertos was a really good one. And as we've just done the Brandenburg concertos last month up here in Sydney and elsewhere, the, the feeling I got at the end of it was one of absolute physical and mental exhaustion.
So much joy I can't even describe.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
And as I said, if, if you are doing your job properly as a consort musician, either as a player or as a singer, you're not just concentrating on your own part. You know your part so well that you can actually look at what everything else is going on. The nice thing about being a singer, of course, with Modern Editions is you actually, you have the full score in front of You. Whereas players don't obviously. And singers at the time probably didn't. They just had their own parts. But now you actually. You have the luxury of having the whole score so you can watch along and you can see how your parts interact with everyone else's.
Yeah, that's great.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: And who would have performed these pieces, do you think?
[00:17:09] Speaker B: I mean, I don't know for sure, but I imagine they were written for his church choir. Those boys. I mean they must. Maybe they just because they did it every day, they didn't know it was difficult going back to these boys in Durham. I think they didn't know it was difficult because no one told them it was. They just did it. It was expected of them.
And I think that's just. It must be the case.
You know, there are plenty of choruses in the cantatas which are as complex as these, but they tend to be shorter and you get a break in the middle when someone sings some restitles. Someone sings an aria. Of course, to be Minor Mass maybe is one of those things. But was that ever performed complete in his lifetime? It was written in bits, wasn't it?
Likewise the passions. You're on your feet for a bit but then you get a bit of a rest.
So yeah, they're particularly difficult.
But I also imagine the members of the choir, the St. Thomas's they would have lapped them up because they're fun in the end. Even the sad ones, they are such fun to sing.
You feel a bit selfish really. I can't imagine the audience can enjoy it as much as the performance.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Isn't that wonderful to have music that does that to you as a performer and.
And as. As an audience. That is truly the genius of Bach, isn't it? It's so satisfying to perform it is a singer or as an instrumentalist.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: I think you've got to be careful that you don't get too self satisfied and sort of. But at the same time, I think the most enjoyable concerts that I've been to as an audience member of the ones where the players are having fun.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that goes for all music, doesn't it?
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. And it has to be fun.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: It does. Otherwise we should pack up and go home.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And. But obviously it can only really be fun if you've. If you've actually worked at it and you know, you've got to make it look easy, but it isn't.
So it's going to be interesting to sing again. I don't think there's anything I've ever Done. That's harder than singing them all in the concert, because if you're on stage as an opera singer, you might be on stage four hours, but you're not singing for all that time.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: That's right. So if. If, for those of you who come to this concert, you're going to see some vocal stamina and fireworks that you have, you won't ever see again until anyone. Well, till the next person decides to be bonkers enough to program all the motets in one program.
[00:19:27] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So if. As if you go to the B Minor Mass or the. The. You go to Messiah or whatever, those big pieces, they are hard work, but there are plenty of down. There's plenty of downtime. This is. There isn't any downtime in these pieces. They're really intense. And it's the intellectual intensity as well as the physical and everything emotional.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, they're so passionate. We were talking about that bit in the middle of Je Zelmeine Freude, which is all about dragons.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: Wow. Where did that come from?
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's. It's, It's. It's extraordinary. Quite pantomimey in places. He's just really.
He takes the rhetoric to another level and. And he's. The fireworks and the music and the way he. He sets these texts. And sometimes you all come together singing the same words and the same rhythms, and sometimes you're bouncing off each other or singing semiquavers, going in a different direction, up and down, around the corner.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like his brain has really gone into imagination mode and he's imagining what he can do with these Old Testament friends. Fire and brimstone work.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
Yeah. One of my favorite moments in, in using mine. Of Freud is when he's. We're talking about the dragon and all. An earth shaking and suddenly we all sing. I stay here and sing. It's that extraordinary moment and it just kind of. Oh, it's fantastic.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: It's almost like a Verdi chorus or something.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: Together.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: It's so dramatic. I mean, what would he. Did he ever write an opera? He didn't write an opera, did he? But imagine what he would have done if he had. Maybe this is his closest thing.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: You write the Coffee Cantata. That's like.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess so. Yes.
That's a bit silly, but. Yeah, you're right, it is. But there's so much drama in these.
And that's why it's so important to understand what you're singing about as well. That's. You Know, it's really important that you get inside the language and absolutely, really understand the text. And that one in particular, again, because it's based on. On a hymn. Every other verse is just. There's the lines from this hymn and then in between that, the little sections are commentaries on the meaning of the words.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Now you've brought me to something which is really fascinating. And for those of you out there who know your hymns, particularly your Lutheran hymns, which might be a bizarre thing to say in Australia, but, hey, you never know.
Bach's use or choice of hymns is so important, isn't it? All the way through these motets. It's like he decided to use a particular hymn with a particular text for a particular occasion, very deliberately so it was a way of reaching out to the audience going, hi, guys. Here is this hymn you know so well, you've been hearing it every day of your entire lives. I'm going to insert it here to bring you with me. To bring you to me and to connect more with these words because it's important to me as a composer to bring you on the journey with me.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Absolutely. And, you know. So a lot of the chorales finish with the hymns.
Using mine of folder is unusual in. Because the hymn finishes and, you know, the hymn is spread out throughout it.
Zing it. The hymns in the middle.
Kom user has this wonderful.
You are the way, the truth and the life. It just kind of. It just rolls and rolls and rolls. Again, it's the confidence of this faith.
You know, that's a. That's a funeral motet, but it's. There's such confidence in the words and then. And that movement finishes, finishes with this most beautiful. You know, now I I into your hands I commend my spirit is basically, it's those words having been singing for five or six minutes, just about the truth, the way the truth and the life and this wonderful six, eight. It just rolls forwards and then there's a confident confidence about Christ being the way of the truth and the life. And it finishes with this hymn and that this is a hymn that they would have known, of course. So he takes the text of the motor and then chooses a hymn which kind of sums it all up.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Well, I think therein lies the humility of this man. For me, the fact that when he was composing these pieces, I don't know if he knew he was a staggering genius. He may have.
He may have. I beg your pardon, he may not have the sheer humility of it trying to bring the audience to the Musicians and build a bridge between the, you know, the congregation, the singers and then up to heaven and the gods. It wasn't about him at all. Was it his intellectual and spiritual best to build bridges between everybody and everything and unite us all?
[00:24:01] Speaker B: I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if he was quite a difficult chapter and he would have been very exact, very exacting on his pupils and about the skills. But in the end, the reason for doing it all was this was praise and is confident.
There's nothing questioning about it. It's like the end of the B Minor Mass. The Donna Love is part time is that it's just, it's. There's a confident expectation in salvation which isn't always there. There are plenty of other ways of setting those words in a more questioning manner, you know, or hopeful. But with Bach, it's a confident expectation of salvation.
And he always. Even the, the funeral motets, they all end with this positive.
Yeah, confidence.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: I like that word, confidence.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Yeah. It's not an arrogant, it's not a, we deserve this, you know, it's just a. It's a. But there's. At the same time, there is a confidence that, that Christ will forgive and all will be all right.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. And for us as modern audiences, what do you think these motets can still offer us?
[00:25:04] Speaker B: It's the universal truths, you know, I think it's, it's. It's about accepting, accepting of face, accepting that things don't always go well and realizing the humility to. To accept that you, you might have made a mistake, but that there was a greater purpose out there, you know, And I think the church has done a lot of self harm, you know. You know, let's not go down that route too much. But I think we miss. I think society is missing things by not coming together for a reason other than themselves.
And if you, if you have to go to a concert hall and experience it there, it's. It's better than not experiencing it at all. And to get absorbed, absorbed in this music whilst reading the text, I think it doesn't. It has a lot, an awful lot to offer as an increasingly secular society. And if you don't want, if you don't believe it, it doesn't matter because the music's beautiful. You can just listen to the polyphony and the interplay of the. Of the music without, you know, if the words put you off, there's so much there. But if, if you're moved by the text and this desire for something greater than ourselves, it's it's an extraordinary.
Yeah, it's wonderful.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: It's an extraordinary experience, isn't it?
[00:26:19] Speaker B: It really is and it's very special. And because it's so difficult, you won't get the chance to hear this very often like this.
If you're lucky, you might get one or two in a concert. But to hear them all like this is a real treat. And as it is to perform them.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Yes, I wholeheartedly agree.
What you said about thinking or participating in something that takes you out of yourself and makes you think about the greater good. I think that that's a huge thing that this music can offer us as a modern day society.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: Absolutely. Because why do we. When do we come together? We come together to go to a pop concert. Pop. I'm showing my age, or a sports game. You know, we come together for those things. But how it. Increasingly we're not coming together for these other reasons, I think. I mean, I'm a church musician, have been my whole life and I. It's interesting watching congregations getting smaller and older, people still coming together for that. And you know, a lot of my friends who are church musicians are not religious, but, but at the same time very happy to, to be there to facilitate the worship for those who are and people who are coming together for a reason other than themselves.
The church where I work in Melbourne, we feed the homeless every day of the year.
You know, we're not sort of shouting at you from the pulpit and banging a Bible on your head, we're just putting our money where our mouth is. And every day of the year the homeless get fed breakfast and the people come to the church every Sunday to give thanks for that. And we provide the music for it. And there's a purpose to life, I think. Well, I'm not saying that the, that if you're a secular person, you don't have any purpose, but with Bach there is this extraordinary purpose which is praise and confidence and acceptance.
You know, it's not a. You're not rolling over and just letting it happen, but there's a confident acceptance of forgiveness and salvation.
And it's not. I don't think he expresses it better than he does in these motets.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: All of us could do with thinking about our souls, I guess, a little bit more. And yeah, that's what this music does in the motets. Some of the text talks about if you haven't got your soul, if your soul is not alive, the Holy Spirit, the Ghost, then nothing is alive. You, you might be alive, but you're Dead.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Yes. We're not of the flesh, we are of the spirit.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: That line, it's very, very. Yeah, it's very true. And I think there's a lot of the spiritual world is. Needs. Needs looking after, I think. And there are so many ways to. Spirits. You know, I'm not saying that the Lutheran Christian approach is the only way to do it, but there's a particularly beautiful way of connecting with the spirit and.
Yeah. Something other than ourselves, greater than ourselves. And if. If all God is, is the collected human experience, the collective human experience, if that's all God is, then it's still worth connecting at that level, I think.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Well, you've convinced me.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: Excellent.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yes. And I can't wait to bring my knowledge of Bach as an instrumentalist, having delved into the world of choral music, together with your knowledge of Bach from the other side of the fence, from the choral perspective. And together, along with the other seven singers, we're going to.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: We've got an amazing team. Yeah, it's amazing.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: Very special. And our continuo team of Neil Perez de Costa, Danny yeaden and Pippa McMillan, who bring the world's very best to our underpinning, our harmonic underpinning of these works.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: Yeah, nothing's very exciting.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: It is very, very exciting. And I. I really, really hope those of you listening do come along and hear these extraordinary works which you're unlikely to hear again for a very long time.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: Thank you, Chris. It's been wonderful talking to you about these works, about how they're written, why they were written and what's inside them and what's in store for our audiences.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Yes. And I can't wait to share them.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: Well, we look forward to seeing you all at the Motets.
So if you'd like to hear Bach's complete motets performed by Bach Academy Australia in collaboration with Australia's foremost vocal ensemble, the Song Company.
We kick off in Melbourne on Thursday, February 5th at 7pm in the beautiful St. John's Lutheran Church, which is 20 City Road, South Bank, Victoria.
We then travel back to New South Wales and perform them on Friday, February 6th at 7:30pm at the Wollongong Art Gallery.
After that, we travel back to Sydney and perform them at 2:30pm at the Mossman Art Gallery. Our City of Sydney concert is on Thursday, February 12th at 7:30pm in the beautiful St. James Church of King Street.
We finish our motets pilgrimage down in bowral on Friday, February 13 at 7.30pm in the Bowrel Memorial Hall. We very much hope you're going to join us for this incredible pilgrimage through Bach's motets.
It.
